iirc, the clients use the certs but ignore them. but to the censor they see the certs are well known, so allow them thru

I tried to do FP with Python a few years ago..

It taught me to just stay canonical, otherwise it's frustrating (maybe my expectations were too high!).

You can't come close to Haskell / Elm experience and Python will give you lots of papercuts along the way.

Rust is another language which gives us the kitchen sink, allows anyone to do anything when they are in a bind.

- quoting Jon Carmack -

whatever the compiler allows in, will eventually be included in your codebase

It's an improvement over C. But where were the hard decisions? Where is the line in the sand on safety? (I am hopingg to bbe educatted! ; ))

It's not the future, just more of the past.

Interesting how American citizens / informants are seduced and reckless, whereas Chinese sources act out of worries about corruption.

E7ther biases, or possibly about to change sharply in age of Trump.

Have you ever seen the anti spying posters in china? They totally are oriented around seduction and recklessness (Chinese girls are warned about handsome foreigners, and so on).

I suppose, I expect more from NYT

We only know about the informants who get clapped, there's perhaps not enough information available to make pronouncements.

Many would argue that not switching to pinyin was a huge error.

Chinese literacy isn't necessarily that great...

E.g.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-literacy-rate-in-China-so-h...

I started learning mandarin only a few months ago, but from what i learned so far, there is no easy way to switch from 汉字 to pinyin. Pinyin is an essential learning tool, but loses to much context and meaning encoded in the chinese characters. Even texts in the textbook somewhere after the 10th lesson start making much more sense when written in chinese characters than in pinyin.

To understand how pinyin helps Chinese become literate you have to start from a Chinese perspective. For an illiterate Chinese, he/she would be fluent in the spoken Chinese. So the barrier is the connection between written characters and pronunciations. Pinyin bridges that. With starter reading materials that are annotated with Pinyin, people can read (sound) the material and understand the material. So pinyin lets people read materials that even when it contains characters that they don't know. Pinyin lets people read, and by reading, people learn the written form and become literate.

It's not trivial - I would not want to read an English or German text written in IPA. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that it is quite possible to write Mandarin in some sort of alphabetic script quite easily.

What people have been doing in Chinese is basically write only one syllable of a multi-syllable word, which would be ambiguous in speech, but disambiguated in writing by the character. But then, if your writing were more phonetic, you'd just have to write the full word.

I don't quite understand what you mean. In modern standard mandarin it is pretty much one character = one syllable. They'd have to travel 3000 years back in time to recover the lost syllables.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

My point is that written Chinese is much terser than spoken Chinese (particularly classical Chinese, of course) and that this is enabled by the disambiguation inherent in the characters. That is, where in spoken language you'd use a two-character word, when writing it would be sufficient to write just one character to evoke what's meant.

Now, if you were to write in some sort of alphabetical script, you'd just write the full two-syllable word.

Slighly offtopic. Our own languages start incorporating pictograms and hieroglyphs, there are a little over 1000 emoji codepoints. How many syllables do you need to spell out an emoji?

Virtually all languages use semantic digits to represent numbers. Just like the way you used "a little over 1000 emoji", instead of "a little over one thousand emoji". There's 10 "semantic" digits to the 26 "phonetic" letters on a keyboard.

Actually - the legend goes - that Mao wanted to ditch Chinese characters in favour of Pinyin, until Stalin said every great civilisation needs its own writing system.

Chinese writing was seen as a factor in holding back the country - everything was up for change or removal.

Cool!